Does doing it better mean I have to do it less?

I love running, I really do.

I’ll spend my afternoons stretching and checking the outside temperature until I can run without the risk of heatstroke. I like the way my knees feel all wobbly coming down the stairs to my apartment. I like the way my armpits chafe after a particularly humid day, and while I don’t run quite long enough to accomplish “runner’s nipple” I am looking forward to it.

My breath, once jagged and uneven, is now smooth and deep, even on the most intense of runs.

The myth of the runner’s high? It’s real and I get it so easily.

After every run, my lungs want to keep going while my legs are screaming out in agony.

Sadly, it seems that I need to run less if I am going to run better. I completed the “Couch to 5k” program in record time. Instead of running three sessions a week, I ran almost every single day, completing a 9-week program in just under 5 weeks. It was quite an accomplishment for me, as I’ve never completed any sort of fitness program, much less in record time.

After fininshing the program (actually, quite a bit beforehand) I went online looking for more intense running programs to increase my milege and better my times. Two weeks into the “Couch to 5k” I had decided to run a marathon, and even now in my preliminary training for a half-marathon I find myself looking up triathlons.

I’m reading books on how to go further and faster.

In every source I find, I see two evil little words: crosstraining and rest.

Rest?

You mean, not running?

The half-marathon schedule that I’m about to jump into only has my running three days a week, with rest on two days and crosstraining (ie; a workout video or weight lifting) on the remaining two days. I wouldn’t have believed it, except every other schedule I get my hands on has pretty much the same configuration.

Shit.

So, upon writing my pretraining schedule this morning I’m grudgingly putting in a few days of non-running.